Announcing Freedom Summer of Code

(en) Riseup Labs is excited to announce the Freedom Summer of Code! We aim to advance critical movement technology projects and tools that benefit a wide-variety of radical social justice organizations and movements.

As summer warms the northern hemisphere, hope washes across our global movements for social justice. When not out soaking up the sun, we want you to join Riseup Labs in our first Freedom Summer of Code (FSoC)! Help produce the most cutting edge software for activism, radical politics, organizing, and breaking down capitalist inequities once and for all.

This is an opportunity for real innovation, not just a technology of reproduction, but technologies of revolution. You know that program you always wanted or the change in an existing program? The one every activist would have, if only it existed? This summer lets make it real. By pooling our efforts during the Freedom Summer of Code, we can take back technology from the monolithic proprietary soft-o-crats and create real, lasting change.

Modeled after the successful Google Summer of Code, the Freedom Summer of Code adds a radical social justice twist. We will be working with select tech activist organizations to generate interesting ideas as well as help people develop several projects over the next three months.

The Freedom Summer of Code aims to advance critical movement technology projects and tools that benefit a wide-variety of radical social justice organizations and movements; inspire developers to become more interested in directly participating in social-justice tech organizations; contributes back, for the benefit of all, to the free software world which sustains us while simultaneously honoring individual’s labor; increases the social ownership and democratic control over information, ideas, technology, and the means of communication; empowers organizations and individuals to use technology in struggles for liberation. We are developing software that is geared specifically to the needs of network organizing and democratic collaboration, providing new services that greatly enhance your security and privacy.

To get started, think about how you would like to participate. Regardless of your technical skills, we need your help and have numerous ways to plug into FSoC:

We want your proposals, dream big! Submit any and all politically important technology project proposals for and by the radical tech community! Individuals, or organizations, can submit ideas for what they would like to see done during FSoC. We will collect these proposals and put them online for potential programmers to check out.

Interested organizations should sign up: we want your organization to join FSoC, to not just submit project ideas, but also be an organizational contact person who can act as a facilitator if your project/organization is chosen.

Do you want to participate? Come apply to the program, submit an individual project proposal, and when the time comes, you can pick projects that you are interested in working on.

We also need facilitators, you are encouraged to apply to help individual participants through the process.

To learn about what kinds of things we are looking for, how to submit a proposal, to sign up as participating organization/facilitator or to apply as a participant in the first FSoC, come visit the Freedom Summer of Code site.

We are taking proposals and applications until May 24th. Project decisions will be made by June 1st, and people will start coding. At the end of June and July facilitators will check in on those people working on them to make sure things are going well. After 3 months of freedom, at the beginning of September, projects will come to a close and we will do a final evaluation of the results. For full details, see the program timeline

Riseup Labs received a donation to make the Freedom Summer of Code a reality. We will use this funding as fairly as we know how. Offering assistance to our coders and organizatio where need is greatest or when projects warrant. Hopefully we will receive additional sponsorship as we want to offer meaningful and well deserved stipends to all of our participants.

We want to help develop the best projects, it is our hope that we can provide modest compensation to complete specific work. This can only happen if you are able to help us make it happen. We need your help to offset the costs of living of the participants involved in FSoC. Riseup Labs is able to accept US tax deductible donations as a 501c3 charitable non-profit. If you live in the US, this means that the more you give to Riseup Labs, the less you will be giving to military conquest. How can you pass that up? Not only that, but if you work for a corporation that provides matching funds for charitable donations, we can do those too. Now thats revolution from within!

Organizations who would like to become co-sponsors of FSoC with Riseup Labs can do so by offering donations (of time, labor, money etc) to help us with the work and help us enable more coders.

With your help, another technology is possible. Join the Freedom Summer of Code now!

For seven years, Riseup has provided secure, movement-run services to hundreds of thousands of folks and organizations. We feel that in an era of automated mass surveillance, it is a deeply radical act to provide secure alternatives to the corporate controlled internet Although we still have a lot of work to do to improve reliability and expand capacity, lately we have become limited by the available tools. This is where the FSoC comes into play.

The Freedom Summer of Code is an effort of Riseup Labs, the research arm of the Riseup Collective.